The invention relates to a machine and a method for the production of knitgoods, comprising a base fabric having an additional plush or pile layer, said plush or pile layer being produced either by the knitting-in of additional plush or pile threads to produce a plush or terry or loop pile plush fabric, or by the combing-in of additional fibers from a fleece or a sliver to produce a fur on high pile fabric.
On known circular knitting machines of this type, two yarn feeders are provided at every knitting system, one of said feeders supplying the ground thread and the other the pile thread or the fibers so that at each knitting system, a new course is knitted from the ground thread and the pile thread or the fibers. A limited colored pattern can be produced in as much that the threads or fibers are of different color.
It has also been proposed to produce plush fabrics with larger colored on non-colored patterns by knitting certain regions only with the ground thread and a single color pile thread (German Gebrauchsmuster 7 231 254 published Nov. 23, 1972). A plush fabric of this type is characterised in that it is more dense and thicker at those regions having pile thread as compared with the remaining regions and that the regions including pile thread are higher in relief, because between them are plain regions, comprising only the ground thread.
Plush fabrics having multi-color patterns also can be produced with circular knitting machines by providing at every knitting system a feed for the ground thread and several feeds for the plush threads (e.g. German Pat. No. 671 333 published Jan. 17, 1944) and by controlling the knitting needles by a patterning mechanism such that at every knitting system, in addition to the ground thread only one selected plush or pile thread is picked up by every needle. However, circular knitting machines of this type have a major disadvantage in that every knitting system on the machine has to be relatively wide. For example, if a plush pattern is to be produced with up to four colors, then every system in addition to the thread feed for the ground thread must include four or more feeders for the plush threads of four different colors. The total number of knitting systems which can be provided around the circumference of the needle cylinder thus depends on the maximum number of colors, and in contrast to a conventional Jacquard circular knitting machine, the production speed cannot be increased, if a pattern of only two or even one color is to be produced, because the production speed depends on the total number of feeds for the ground threads which number is not variable.
To overcome the last-mentioned difficulty, it is possible to use a circular knitting machine which has at every system, one feed for the ground thread and two feeds for two different colored pile threads (e.g. German Pat. No. 671,333) so that patterns can be knitted with two colors in the normal manner. If patterns with more than two colors are to be knitted, e.g. four colors, this will be possible by combining two pairs of knitting systems into one group, such that the first system of each group knits on every needle the ground thread together with one of the first two possible pile threads while the second system of the group knits on every needle the ground thread with one of the two other available pile threads.
The advantage of such a knitting machine is that the production speed, when producing patterns with two different colored pile threads, is twice as fast as when knitting patterns with three or four colored pile threads and correspondingly, three times as fast as when knitting patterns with five or six colored pile threads. This advantage is of course counteracted by the disadvantage that patterns with more than two colors can be produced only by using two or three knitting systems for this purpose, and that consequently, two or three loop courses are knitted with the ground thread, because the ground thread is to be knitted at every system. The result of this is that in patterns with more than two colors, those regions of a course, to which pile threads are allocated but which can be introduced only in another knitting system, cannot include any pile threads, so that only ground threads are knitted in these regions. In the finished fabric these regions without pile threads, give the appearance of bare sections which are desirable only in exceptional cases, because of the ground thread is visible and because of the sickness of the fabric varies.
In similar manner, two types of circular knitting machines can be used to produce sliver high pile or fur fabrics. With one type, every knitting system is associated with a thread feeder for the ground thread and two cards for feeding at least two different fibers, so that two different color fibers can be fed as required to the knitting needles, for example, by using pattern wheels, prior to knitting the ground thread into a stitch (German Pat. No. 568 801, published Jan. 25, 1933 and German DAS 1 585 333, published Oct. 12, 1972). With the other type every knitting system comprises a thread feeder for the ground thread and only one card for feeding one kind of fibers, so that, depending on the pattern, the finished fabric will have a number of regions consisting only of ground thread, which will therefore be visible as bare regions (U.S. Pat. No. 2,953,002).
Similar arrangements can of course be made with flat knitting machines and other types of circular machines.